Thursday, October 23, 2014

More Chestertonian Wit and Wisdom

Here are the latest five instalments of my Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton column from The Open Door magazine.

The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton

Last week I started writing about Chesterton’s book What I Saw in America, written after his
first lecture tour in that country. It
is perhaps the most well-known of his travel books.

Chesterton liked America and Americans. He did not share the
anti-Americanism which is such a common feature of life on this side of the
Atlantic. (Being married to an American woman, I am particularly aware of this.
So many people who consider themselves liberal and free from prejudice are
quite willing to use ‘American’ as a derogatory term).

To me, the most interesting passage in What I Saw in America might be the passage in which Chesterton
discusses American excitability and enthusiasm.

To [an American]
excitement itself is dignified. He counts it a part of his manhood to fast or
fight or rise from a bed of sickness for something, or possibly for anything…
he is not only proud of his energy, he is proud of his excitement. He is not
ashamed of his emotion, of the fire or even the tear in his manly eye…

Of course, there are dangers in this, and Chesterton was
well aware of them. (He was always
insistent on the need for clear thought before action.) But his point here is
that such excitability is a good thing in itself. To be excitable is to be
receptive to the world, to be outward-looking. It is a close relative to that
most Chestertonian of all emotions, wonder.

The devil can quote
Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly
quotes is, 'The kingdom of heaven is within you.' That text has been the stay
and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies
than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction
with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in
answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except
as a little child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit; but thechildlike
spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of
possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike
thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder
at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the
kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else.................................

After writing about G.K. Chesterton’s view of America,
perhaps it is time that I turned closer to home, and examined his relationship
to Ireland.

Few Englishmen have been as friendly towards Ireland as
Chesterton was throughout his entire life. Partly this is explained by his
upbringing. His parents were ardent liberals, and supporters of the Liberal
Party. Bear in mind that liberalism, at this time, was not the insane
philosophy that it has become in our own era. It was, rather, a belief in
freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and other basically noble ideas. In
Britain, liberals also tended to be supporters of Irish Home Rule.

But it wasn’t just upbringing that made Chesterton a friend
of Ireland. Ireland was, in many ways, the embodiment of all he believed in.
Ireland was (at the time that he was writing) fervently Catholic—and, although
Chesterton only converted to Catholicism in his forties, he had Catholic
leanings long before that. As well as this, Ireland was a country of small
farmers, a peasant country. This was Chesterton’s social ideal. He believed
that the land and wealth of a nation should be owned by its people, rather than
being owned by huge corporations. He also admired peasants for their way of
life and their folklore. To quote a line I have already quoted in this series,
Chesterton believed that the Irish peasant was “close to the heavens because he
is close to the Earth.”

Finally, Ireland was
a country famous for its tradition of soldiery. The Wild Geese and other Irish
exiles had distinguished themselves in armies all over the world, including the
British army. Chesterton always preserved a rather boyish enthusiasm for
soldiers and war. (His novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which
portrays a war between London suburbs, is an example of this. Many readers are
taken aback at its almost gleeful scenes of bloodshed.) He carried a swordstick
wherever he went, and the very name Swords—the village in Dublin, that is—inspired
him to write a poem. (It’s a very bad poem.)

Chesterton was famous for his paradoxes, of course, and in
his day there was a particularly Irish form of paradox known as an ‘Irish
bull’. This was a humorous contradiction in terms, a slip to which the
loquacious Irish were considered prone. (You don’t hear the term much today.
More political correctness!) Chesterton often quoted (and, indeed, invented)
Irish bulls. His best was: “One man is just as good as another…and a good deal
better besides”!

..................................

Last week I promised to write more about G.K.
Chesterton’s views on Ireland. For that purpose, I have been leafing through Irish Impressions, one of two books he
wrote about Ireland. (The second book, Christendom
in Dublin, is more of an extended essay than a book. It’s about the 1932
Eucharistic Congress in Dublin.) But I found myself feeling frustrated as I
browsed its pages.

The truth is that the Ireland Chesterton wrote about is
very different from the Ireland of today. For instance, Chesterton writes that
“the whole
trend of the modern world is directly opposite to the whole trend of the modern
Irish world.” He wrote this in 1919, three years after the Easter Rising (a
rebellion that Chesterton regarded as an error on the part of the rebels).
Ireland at this time was exuberantly Catholic and nationalist, and was
fundamentally a country of small farmers. There were high hopes that, after
independence, the Irish nation would develop in a different direction than England
had, that it would not copy the industrial cities, irreligion and trashy books
and newspapers that—according to Irish nationalists—were typical of the England
of that time. As we know, these hopes turned out to be ill-founded. It is
rather saddening to read Irish
Impressions and Christendom in Dublin
today.

The purpose of the visit which Chesterton describes in Irish Impressions was one which might
raise eyebrows amongst my readers. He was seeking to raise volunteers for the
English war effort in World War One. Chesterton was an ardent supporter of the
Allied cause. He understood why Irish men might not wish to enlist, but this
was his reasoning as to why they should:

I entirely sympathise with their being in revolt against the British
Government. I am in revolt in most ways against the British Government myself. But
politics are a fugitive thing in the face of history. Does anybody want to be
fixed for ever on the wrong side at the Battle of Marathon, through a quarrel
with some Archon whose very name is forgotten? Does anybody want to be
remembered as a friend of Attila, through a breach of friendship with Aetius? In any case, it was with a profound
conviction that if Prussia won, Europe must perish, and that if Europe perished
England and Ireland must perish together, that I went to Dublin in those dark
days of the last year of the war.

The wrong side? As
they say, Homer nods.

...............................................

In this
series so far, we have taken an overview of Chesterton’s fundamental ideas, the
history of his spiritual development, his eventual conversion to Catholicism,
and his most important relationships. We have sampled some of his writings on
particular subjects such as marriage and travel. At this point we will begin a
chronological tour of his long (and very industrious!) writing career. Take a
deep breath…

Chesterton’s
first published writing appeared, as with many writers, during his school
years. He was a member of the Junior Debating Club, a club of school-friends
with literary and other intellectual aspirations, who produced their own
magazine. Another famous member of this club was Edmund Clerihew Bentley, the
detective novelist and inventor of the poetic form called the clerihew. You’re
probably familiar with clerihews even if you don’t recognise the name. Here is
one of the most famous:

Sir
Christopher WrenSaid “I am
going to dine with some men.

If anyone
callsSay I am
designing St. Paul’s.”

The book in
which these breezy little verses made their debut was Biography for
Beginners (1905), and Chesterton provided the illustrations to Bentley’s
text. Chesterton had a talent for drawing spiky, madcap cartoons. He also
illustrated the light verse of his friend Hilaire Belloc.

Chesterton’s
first proper book was also a volume of light verse and illustrations, published
by his proud father in 1900, and titled Greybeards at Play. Chesterton
wrote some masterful humorous verse—but not in this book!

In the same
year, Chesterton’s father also financed a collection of his son’s serious
poetry, The Wild Knight. The volume contains two of Chesterton’s most
famous poems, ‘By the Babe Unborn’ and ‘The Donkey’. The first puts into verse
the thoughts of a baby longing to be born and to experience all the wonders we
take for granted.

As for ‘The
Donkey’, it is Chesterton’s most famous poem and you probably know it
already—perhaps even by heart. It has a school-room simplicity which has justly
made it a classic. In it, we are given the supposed thoughts of a donkey, who
admits to being a ‘parody on all four-footed things.’ But then comes the great
final verse when the donkey recalls its finest hour:

Fools! For I
also had my hour;One far fierce hour and
sweet:There was a
shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

Chesterton, not yet a professed Christian,
was already writing about Christ.

...........................

Last week, we looked at Chesterton’s
earliest publications— two volumes of verse, one comic and one (more or less)
serious. His first book in prose appeared in 1901, when he was twenty-seven.
The title, The Defendant, is perhaps a surprising one for a young
writer. Most young writers, then as now, are more interested in attack than
defence. Young people have always had a taste for trying to knock down what
their elders have built up. But the paradox is that, in Chesterton’s day—and
this trend has only accelerated in our own—the passion for knocking things down
had become so universal, amongst both the young and the old, that the real
rebel was the one who came to the protection of old institutions and
traditional morality. As Chesterton put it (in The Defendant itself) “The act of
defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice.”

Chesterton, however, was not
just rebelling against rebellion. In this book, his first blast of the trumpet
against the monstrous intellectual fashions of his day, he strikes a note that
he kept up throughout his entire career. There is nothing in The Defendant
that would contradict anything Chesterton wrote later in life.

The book is also extraordinary for
its confidence. All through his writing career, Chesterton wrote “not as the
Scribes, but as one who had authority.” Here, for instance, is the paragraph
that sums up the theme of The Defendant:

For the mind and eyes of the average
man this world is as lost as Eden andas sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of human
history—that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to
undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind,
the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but
towards this weird and horrible humility.

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox
forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his
environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This
is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall.

Not for Chesterton the plodding
business of quoting authorities and examples, or laboriously weighing up the
‘For’ and ‘Against’. He made bold and dazzling claims from the very first—and
defended them. More on The Defendant next week.

Clickworthy...

How do I join the GK Chesterton Society of Ireland?

By sending a mail to irishchesterton@gmail.com, that's how! Membership is free and open to anyone living on the island of Ireland. If you send us your email address, we will send you notifications of upcoming meetings.

Whoever you are, if you have any interest in Chesterton-- join the club!